BACKGROUND Reprocessing of endoscopes generally requires labour-intensive manual cleaning followed by high-level disinfection in an automated endoscope reprocessor (AER). EVOTECH Endoscope Cleaner and Reprocessor (ECR) is approved for fully automated cleaning and disinfection whereas AERs require manual cleaning prior to the high-level disinfection procedure. The purpose of this economic evalua...

Multi-agent algorithms inspired by the division of labour in social insects and by markets, are applied to a constrained problem of distributed task allocation. The efficiency (average number of tasks performed), the flexibility (ability to react to changes in the environment), and the sensitivity to load (ability to cope with differing demands) are investigated in both static and dynamic envir...

European governments aim to raise labour supply, cut unemployment rates and, at the same time, maintain social cohesion. Yet, economists have always stressed the trade-off between these objectives. This paper explores whether the frontier of the equity-efficiency trade-off can be shifted outwards in the Netherlands by using an applied general equilibrium model. In particular, we consider variou...

The endogenous approach to regional development policy has become central over the last decade. By employing the conditional frontier approach, this paper investigates the relative contribution to labour productivity growth of: (1) capital accumulation, (2) exogenous technical change and efficiency, and (3) endogenous technological capabilities – i.e. innovation capability and human capital. We...

_____________________________________________________________________ We ask whether the objective of egalitarian allocation of a merit good could be achieved by making the good available at multiple outlets charging different money and time prices. Differential pricing could separate high and low wage buyers across outlets, and proportional allocation of supply could ensure that consumption is...

The paper provides reflections on feasibility of online data mining (ODM) and its employment in decision-making and control. Besides reviewing existing works in different domains of Data Mining, we also report experiences from ongoing project dedicated to monitoring labour market with the aid of dedicated intelligent information system. Benefits of ODM include high efficiency, availability of d...

In the ordinary macro-economic input-output tables, the industrial sector consists of several dozen industries and each industry in a certain sector is an aggregate of many companies in the sector. The sectoral statistics are the sum of statistics of companies in the respective sector. Usually, all sectors have the same set of inputs for producing outputs. For example, they have labour, capital...

The endogenous approach to regional development policy has become central over the last decade. By employing the conditional frontier approach, this paper investigates the relative contribution to labour productivity growth of: (1) capital accumulation, (2) exogenous technical change and efficiency, and (3) endogenous technological capabilities – i.e. innovation capability and human capital. We...

Using a two-bloc endogenous growth model calibrated to two generic sending and receiving countries of equal size, we assess the growth and welfare impact of world migration flows of different skill compositions. The sending country (East) has a lower total factor productivity and a lower endowment of skilled labour. Migration can induce two growth-enhancing effects: an efficiency effect from th...

This paper describes the optimization of maintenance workforce scheduling at Afam power station in Nigeria. The objective is to determine the optimum schedule to satisfy growing maintenance labour requirements with minimum cost and highest efficiency. Three alternative maintenance workforce schedules are compared. The first alternative is to continue with the traditional five-day workweek sched...